I 



The Story of Marble Island. 117 



the whale fishery, let it be spoken to their praise, have erected this 

 monument on the spot where they would have carefully laid their 

 bodies could they have recovered them. It is very simple, very _ 

 plain, and badly lettered ; yet it stands away up in that far north 

 land, declaring to the God above and to all who find shelter in the 

 little harbour, that those whose lives it commemorates died in the 

 discharge of their dangerous duties, and were mourned over by true 

 and affectionate friends. 



Here is another slab that speaks in powerful language : " Erected 

 by the crew of the barque George and Mary," to mark the grave 

 and perpetuate the memory of George Verino, " who died of con- 

 sumption," in 1878, in the twenty-second year of his age. Poor 

 George Verino ! at the age of only twenty-two ; away up on the 

 barren rocks of inhospitable Marble island, he dies of consumption- 

 There are marks about his grave that indicate how he was beloved 

 by all the crew. The little mound had been sodded over with a 

 stunted grass turf, obtained with some labour and exertion from a 

 neighbouring valley, no doubt to keep the grave green, as a token 

 of the way in which his memory should be kept by his comrades. 

 Poor Verino had died after facing the grim monster for many long 

 weary days, as all consumptives die, wasting away and sinking 

 under the influence of slow disease. How lonely and how heart- 

 sick he must have been in the dark, dirty, grave-like forecastle of 

 the little barque. Spring came llite in June, but there were no open- 

 ing flowers or budding trees to gladden his heart ; there were no 

 sino-insr birds to brinof his soul into close communion with its Master. 

 Loved ones were far away; he longed to be with them, but death 

 held him in its grasp. The bible that his mother gave him, if he had 

 been so careful as to preserve it, was read long and often. The 

 photographs of relations and friends were his best companions ; and, 

 more than likely, he pressed to his lips the likeness of one dearer 

 than all others, the one whom he had promised to love and protect. 

 He could see her no more in this world. How sad were the last 

 days of poor George Verino. But he escaped, we trust, to the better 

 land ; and it matters, I fancy, but little to him to-day, that the point 

 of his departure was in the ever frozen regions of the far north. 



